If you find that your displacement is breaking open your mesh at corners/edges, try turning off the smoothing option on your displacement settings.

Example (click to enlarge)

One thing of note when using HDRI's in Max9 with mental ray. Be sure to use the logarithmic exposure control and enable the affect background and environment maps option. If not, you'll likely end up with some strange colored artifacts in your scene.

It also seems a bit easier to obtain nice results with .hdr's in Max9 / mental ray 3.5 than in previous builds. The interpolation setting will really smooth out those splotches that we normally see...unless we use a ton of samples (and you know what that does to your render times).

Example (click to enlarge)


Settings (click to enlarge)


And one last note on this entry....
I wish a Merry Christmas to those that celebrate Christmas and a prosperous (and safe) New Year to everyone!

Cheers!

Now that I find myself using the newly tweaked log. exposure control in Max9, I have to adjust my workflow a bit for the log. exposure control. Let's take fog as an example. You have your scene all setup with the new daylight system and logarithmic exposure control. But now you want to add a mist(lume) shader to create some fog in your scene.

Here's what you'll most likely get:


Obviously something isn't right. I've specified the fog to be a white color, not black. Well, it's because the log. exposure control is dampening the effect. You have two options, you can adjust the log. exposure control settings to try and balance it or just add an output map to your mist shader to boost the brightness. Since adjusting the log. exposure control would affect my entire scene, I chose to add an output map to my mist shader.

Mist with an output map:


So keep in mind that you can create a fog effect from within the mental ray daylight system. But if you create your own fog, don't forget about the effect the log. exposure control could have on it.

This entry stems from a thread at mymentalray.com. http://mymentalray.com/forum/showthread.php?t=142
It was originally a discussion about reflections on the car paint shader in Max9. But as it often happens, the discussion changed course a bit and now it seems we are discussing "the mental ray material". Do you know which one that is? Is the the glass physics phen? Is it the new A&D material? Is it any material that you can get to work with mental ray (lol)?

Well, actually "the mental ray material" as mentioned by Zap (http://mentalraytips.blogspot.com/) looks like this:


Since "the mental ray material" is a rather broad description, I've found that people will often call lot's of the materials/shaders out there a mental ray material. So the next time you find yourself on your favorite forum asking for help with a mental ray material...to prevent confusion, make sure you're clear as to what material it is: "the mental ray material", or "A&D material", or "DGS material (physics_phen)", etc.

Here's a quick and dirty aluminum/dull metal material setup for the new A&D material in Max9:


More info on why I made that particular test can be found here:
http://mymentalray.com/forum/showth...p=1052#post1052
(great site btw, so if you're a mental ray user you'll want to add it to your bookmarks)

Finally, I've been working on creating a "plane vanilla" studio setup for rendering various objects (mental ray of course). Here are some early previews, a bit more tweaking to make..but the yellow example is getting close to completion.




The insanely detailed car model used in that scene was created by "Swips" at Turbosquid.com
http://www.turbosquid.com/FullPrevi...x.cfm/ID/320214